Dmetri's Critical Eye hosts two guests in this edition:
Break,Blow,Burn by Camille Paglia
and
Young Turk by Moris Fahri

Break,Blow,Burn
Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia, scholar and cultural commentator, came to public notice in 1990 with the publication of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. In the subsequent period, Paglia also published two essay collections and a book on Hitchcock's The Birds. Curiously for such an opinionated motor mouth she has been largely silent since America went to war with the rest of the world. Her new book, Break, Blow, Burn, comes out of this relatively gagged period.

Consisting of line-by-line readings of 43 of the world's best poems, Break, Blow, Burn is intended to be a lesson in how to read a poem, and how to recognise and appreciate poetic subtlety and nuance. It is aimed at the general reader, and not necessarily at the specialist.

Paglia claims the key to unlocking the mystery of literature was and still is the New Criticism of the 1960s. Thus she sets aside the polemics and fireworks that enlivened Sexual Personae and uses only the tools of the New Criticism to unlock literature for the layperson. Unfortunately, by doing so she might have suppressed much of her exuberance and her uncanny ability to effortlessly unearth arcana. Gone too is her laugh-out-loud wit, rapid-fire intellect and solar energy.

For all its good intentions, Break, Blow, Burn fizzles out before the end. There is nothing or very little of the brave sallying forth that we saw and came to admire in chapter after chapter of Sexual Personae. There remains no doubt that much of what lays between these covers would stand as pleasurable writing in its own right; however, some of the readings fall short of expectation, as does the choice of poems.

Paglia begins with the canon: two lyrics by George Herbert follow sonnets by Shakespeare and John Donne. Then she moves on to Marvell, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge. She ends the English phase by giving a virtuoso reading of Sylvia Plath's ‘Daddy' before capping it off with two poems by Yeats.

Not surprisingly, the American section opens with a Whitman. The two by Dickinson are representative, though by no means are they the best to be had from this astounding visionary, and nor do the readings come close to the Dickinson chapter that closes Sexual Personae. Paglia then turns to modernists such as Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. Astoundingly, there is no Hart Crane, e. e. cummings, or W. H. Auden. Had the latter, especially, been represented, Paglia would have really been able to test her theory that modern poets have been unable to produce works that last.

The book trails off with a hotchpotch of contemporary work that Paglia claims was the best she could find, which left me thinking that she did not look long or hard enough. And I became suspicious of her motives when the book ended with ‘Woodstock' by Joni Mitchell. This, Paglia proclaims, is ‘an important modern poem—possibly the most popular and influential poem composed in English since Sylvia Plath's “Daddy.”' The only possible response to that is that Joni Mitchell is a lightweight when compared with the grace and stately poetry of a Virginia Hamilton Adair, and Mitchell's limp lyric is one of the more forgettable gestures of its age. To include it here was a major miscalculation.

In making the selections for this book, Paglia has avoided works coming from outside Anglophone countries, claiming that ‘translation is problematic'. Indeed, it is. But we now have available to us numerous and varied translations of major international poets from which to draw and make comparative readings. Had Paglia removed her American blinkers she would have seen a stellar line up beckoning: Yiannis Ritsos, Nazim Hikment, Faiz Ahmet Faiz, Dimitris Tsaloumas, Arthur Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Fernando Pessoa, Anna Ahmatova. The list is endless. Has she taken this route, Break, Blow, Burn would have been a livelier and more bracing book. One that would have further strengthened Paglia's professed multiculturalism.

Paglia is capable of great intelligence in this book, but often she ends up paraphrasing the obvious and responding to imagery with free flowing imagery-by-association, drawn from her unending reservoir of pop-culture references. She is not interested enough in internal poetic logic, and nor is she particularly keen to show the way poetry works through form and design. Had she been, Break, Blow, Burn would now be a classic.

What concerns me, though, is that this book reads as if it were written by a Paglia that is a mere shadow of her former self. Rather than the cruel diva that penned the essays in Vamps and Tramps, this slender tome confronts us with someone who has abandoned the dizzy heights of Olympus to bunk down with mere mortals. Hopefully she was only having a siesta and will soon re-don her Amazon battle fatigues.

Young Turk
Motis Farhi

Born in Ankara in 1935, Moris Farhi is the acclaimed author of Children of the Rainbow and Journey Through the Wilderness, among others. He has lived most of his life in London. His latest novel, Young Turk, is a sweeping epic of the very best kind – one that successfully manages to juggle a large cast of characters, struggling to survive during the most turbulent years in Turkish history, while remaining intimate, lyric.

Beginning in 1939 and ending in 1959, Young Turk serves up thirteen characters, each with his or her own chapter, and each with a story you want to hear. By the end, you feel like you know the men and women intimately, and you mourn their loss. You want to hold on to their purity, their idealism, their dreams, for themselves and for their country. So you turn to the first page and begin reading anew, or dip into certain sections, to savour a sentence, a moment. It's that kind of book.

Moris Farhi is a man with grand ideas about universality and cultural pluralism. That's why he sets his story in an archetypal Istanbul and populates it with Turks, Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Gypsies, Kurds, Pomaks. Different races. Different religions. What they share is a culture, language and the belief that they are all Turks, passionate about their country's future and destiny. Their high priest is Nazim Hikmet, one of the great poetic voices of the 20th century, and they all act out their dramas on the streets. From first to last, the people in this book rush from one end of Istanbul to the other, brushing shoulders, locking limbs, and just as often lips, heading toward widely diverging destinies. Istanbul is, therefore, the fourteenth character, bolstering her children by the sheer exuberance of her presence alone.

In this largely autobiographical work, Farhi aims to show how Turkey squandered a generation through torture, imprisonment and exile, though the book is nowhere near as grim as it might sound.

The first to tell his tale is Muslim boy Rifat. His adoration for Gül, a young Jewish girl with premonitions of the genocides that will soon sweep Europe sets the tone. At the end is Ahmet Poyraz, teacher and mentor to a generation, delivering his final words to the students that have scattered like birds on the wind. So prophetic, so messianic is his voice, so steeped in a kind of universal melancholic truth, that he might as well be addressing men and women everywhere. More pertinently, he speaks against those who went counter to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's ideals for a secular, pluralist state, and suppressed free thought in the name of a pure Turkey.

In between is a tapestry of human beings whose fates intersect and are interwoven. Some favourites are Havva and her relentless pursuit of Adem, the trapeze artist who, after a shattering tragedy, has sworn never to love again. The agonies of post-war Europe are captured through the eyes of fifteen-year-old Yusuf who strikes up an alliance with Saadet, a woman searching for her lost husband in France. Then there's Orhan, the tough guy who offers to protect Konstantin Efendi's restaurant, with far-reaching consequences, from racketeers.

If all this sounds grim, it's not. What makes this book such an unalloyed pleasure to read is the unbridle optimism that the very act of living brings about in the characters. Their joy bursts forth from the page and carries you along like a tide. This is best exemplified than in the chapter where people relieved of the pernicious effects of politics are free to act as themselves. In one of the chapters we find out that during World War Two the Turkish government levied a wealth tax on all ethnic minorities across the country. Those unable to pay were sent to labour camps, leaving behind families that would either starve or sink to some kind of ignominy. Unable to remain unaffected by their plight Turkish friends and neighbours pooled their resources to look after them, until the law is eventually repealed. It's the kind of material that makes the heart soar even as it shines a kindly light on a people all too often maligned.

As one becomes ever more familiar with Farhi's body of work, it doesn't take much to see that he believes art and sex are the lifeblood. Thus, for much of its length, Young Turk bubbles over with a tingling eroticism that is indicative of how ethics and politics are often nourished by sexual intimacy. For instance, Mustafa discovers that ‘there is no holier creation than the human body'. Rifat is told that his soon-to-be-circumcised penis is ‘the key to heaven'. Inside the Turkish bath, Selim and Musa sing their praises to the varieties of aureoles and clitoris. And in a country that restricts the female sex, Mustafa stumbling across the older woman who initiates him and his classmates in the ways of the flesh is a carnal delight of the first order.

Reading this pellucid, anti-novel is like immersing yourself in a full-throated hymn to the potential inherent in a country such as Turkey. The power of the tales is in the inspired telling and the concentration on the lives of little people with immense, indomitable spirits. Reading them, you apprehend the power of Moris Farhi's imagination and his passionate humanism.

Young Turkand an earlier novel, Children of the Rainbow, are now available in English and Turkish.